World War 2 With Twinkl

At the beginning of the Month, I sat and wondered what our next subject was going to be and as always Twinkl had their Topic and events calendar filled with ideas.

This section on their main menu is always my first check list for upcoming subjects in which I find myself building projects for to keep the children refreshed and ready and when I came across an event called VE Day , I knew it would bring a whole new and wonderful area of questioning and learning for the children so I got set on preparing their work and by the time I had it all printed out and ready for them to start on 1ST May , I had a whole World War 2 project filled with many interesting facts and resources to last us the two weeks I initially wanted to use to cover the subject for .

After finding our subject I got straight onto our Work And Show wall which I added into our new Dining room (new classroom). 
We have one wall for displaying our work and one wall for the white board which my father in law was so generous to give us  last month so work is more organised and the children love being able to see their finished projects when complete or in progress.
We are still trying to get our room just right for them but now they have plenty room , I just need to work on the storage side of things for their work and resources.

You can always find great ready made Display banners and borders to add onto your wall to get started but Twinkl have a lovely feature where you can create your own which is sometimes a really fun task for the children if they like to get a little artistic , after all it is their wall , so why not allow them to design it ?

Picking one subject to work on throughout the week is always the easiest way for me to get the children to work in all other areas such as math , English, science , social studies, health and well being , expressive arts, technology, history and geography as well as many other areas.

To be fare I do not use the feature such as Home education and tend to use the search bar which is the quickest way to find my way to finding everything I need usually .
By typing the subject name in the search bar , (in our case World War 2 ), an array of wonderful work ideas come right in front of you ready to download or print for use now or later on . 

A great feature in Twinkl is that they tend to have many lesson plans for people like myself who home educate or for teachers and so while it is sometimes hard to know everything (and I am sure most do not), I'm not very intelligent myself so I tend to learn with my children and we do everything together meaning when someone has a lesson plan there for you it makes things a lot easier to organize and understand as well as giving you , the teacher more time to sit and help the children with the work . Twinkl have some fantastic plans their and ready to print and download for all areas and abilities on their site and we found around three which varied in types or resources and activities for all ages of the children to enjoy so I worked from all of them on this occasions , bouncing from one sheet to another , keeping them all busy and full of learning , usually I would only use one though.

I find starting with a timeline always brings a great starting point and helps the children to understand the subject and what we are about to be talking about and these are always a great first activity that are usually ready for you depending on what subject your looking for , we printed ours out and put it straight onto the wall so they could see it at all times .

We needed to learn all about who was involved and where it all happened  so we looked at Allies and Axis, the main people who fought in the world war 2 and looked at each countries  differences in culture, their flags, their places on the map and even their National Anthems , the children chose a different country each and researched them on their own using books and online resources that were freely available to them .

During their first week they looked at the timeline, who the Allies and Axis were and where it all happened and also the Evacuation .

There were many available resources and activities but the children loved their math project which involved building a Respiratory box for the gas mask that their uncle had also hidden away to borrow us for this subject.
They learned about Anne Frank, watched her movie as well as Goodnight Mr Tom and Carries War and built shelters.
They wrote letters and diaries imagining that they were children in the war being evacuated or hiding in an Anderson bomb shelter and learned that life back then was very different to what it is now .
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On our second week we looked at Rationing and what woman's roles were.
They learned that food was not as available as it is today and jobs were more hours with less pay and so the recipes were a little different to the ingredients they get so easily today .
Lord Woolton became a great area for us and they learned all about the 'Dig for victory campaign' and the 'make and mend schemes' that were brought in during the World War 2 era.
They made propaganda posters to show of their artistic sides for rationing and also getting people to help fight the wars  and they learned some fantastic sentence building with modal verbs  worksheets and Newspaper articles that they had  to  create.

They now know that woman and men were brought up very differently from the start of a young age , even in schooling to what they are now , they understand it used to be very stereotypical to our now very equal living these days.

We have had a fantastic fortnight on our subject thanks to Twinkl and their resources and can not wait to share with you our next display .